Messages - morticaixavier

I'm in, but I have not brewed a lot lately. What I have right now is three treatments of the same Imperial Porter - one with coffee and little brett, one that spent some time in a bourbon barrel and one plain.So if you like this sort of thing, you may want to tell Amanda.I have some old sour beers, too, to round it out.

I'm in a similar boat actually. Whoever draws me should get ready for some sour beers and perhaps a strong ale or two...

it's a place to start. although I think that only adds up to 97% but I'm sure you can make the difference up somewhere. just call it 53% two row.

You said 2:1 or 3:1. Would 3:1 make for a much different beer?

It would have leads of the toasted bread crust flavor that the Munich brings. Are you using light Munich (6srm) or the dark (10srm)? If the light I would go 2:1 for sure. The dark Munich had more flavor so 3:1 might work better.

I don't see the problem. You love kai's recipe which is 99% dark munich (weyermann most likely), and you accidentally picked up a bag of weyermann dark munich. It sounds like a fortunate accident. I would probably use up the entire bag of dark munich and make up the rest with light munich. Keep your recipe the same for the rest.

he's brewing an Alt this time. he was just saying that he liked the Dunkle recipe hence the decision to try the Alt

how long is the line? you could not worry about it, you could use the end of a spoon or similar to depress the poppet in the QD and just spray the starsan in the sink and then connect the jumper to the destination keg.

you could use the dark munich in place of the caramunich and/or the melanoiden. The defining flavor characteristic of munich (dark more than light) is melanoiden type flavors. the Dark Munich bumps this up even more than light munich.

Right, batch size is easy. What about mash efficiency? Most recipes are scaled to be listed at 70% mash, while I have an average of 84% for a typical 1.060 brew.

best way to find that out is to try it. I would always try a straight up percentage based approach first. If the color is off or the flavor profile is not what you are expecting then you start tweaking character malt percentages to match your expectation. This is the first step of recipe formulation. You begin to learn what ingredient affects what aspect of the finished product and how.

alternately you could try it first by just scaling the base malt and leaving the character malt as it was in the original recipe and if it doesn't meet expectation tweak from there.

I don't think there is a right way, just a right method, hypothesize, experiment, evaluate, repeat.

you won't need to force carb the keg. you will need to let the remaining priming sugar ferment out though. once that happens the keg will be carbonated. However, for some reason that is not readily explainable, a large volume of beer requires less sugar per floz to achieve a given carbonation level than a small volume of beer. So for 5 gallons of beer to be bottled in 12 or 22 floz bottles you generally use ~4 oz of sugar. but for the same volume of beer in a keg, to naturally carbonate requires more like 3 oz.

I believe the difference in priming sugar amounts between kegging and bottling is due to head space. In bottles, a larger percentage of the container is head space compared to beer volume. In a keg this percentage of head space is lower. Thus less CO2 is needed to fill that head space in a keg. And less CO2 means less priming sugar.

Yup, this is the way to bottle if you have the keg available. You can push it into bottles with a little co2. bottle as many or as few as you want and let the rest carb up in the keg. The keg portion might get a bit over carbed but that is easily handled by bleeding off excess pressure and letting the beer come to equilibrium.

Interesting. So by "come to equilibrium", do you mean that after I bottle whatever amount, I take pressure off the keg, and in essence, let it go flat, before force carbonating?

you won't need to force carb the keg. you will need to let the remaining priming sugar ferment out though. once that happens the keg will be carbonated. However, for some reason that is not readily explainable, a large volume of beer requires less sugar per floz to achieve a given carbonation level than a small volume of beer. So for 5 gallons of beer to be bottled in 12 or 22 floz bottles you generally use ~4 oz of sugar. but for the same volume of beer in a keg, to naturally carbonate requires more like 3 oz.

so in you plan you will be adding enough sugar to carbonate the full volume in 12 or 22 floz bottles but only packaging about half of it that way. The half that remains in the keg will carbonate naturally as well. But because of this quirk with natural carbonation the half in the keg will likely end up slightly over carbed. So you bleed off co2 after it is done carbonating and let it come to equilibrium with whatever PSI you WOULD have used to force carb.

Yup, this is the way to bottle if you have the keg available. You can push it into bottles with a little co2. bottle as many or as few as you want and let the rest carb up in the keg. The keg portion might get a bit over carbed but that is easily handled by bleeding off excess pressure and letting the beer come to equilibrium.